Ina recent video, YouTuberPatrick Willemsintroduced “The Super Mario Super Spectrum of Adaptation Fidelity.” At one end of the spectrum, Willems placed the 1993 Super Mario Bros., a movie that resembled the video games on which it was based in almost nothing but name. At the other extreme, he placed 2023’sThe Super Mario Bros. Movie, which did little but earnestly attempt to reproduce theMariogames as faithfully as possible in film form. One was a more interesting movie, one was more exciting for fans.
To Be Canon, Or Not To Be Canon
Given howbig video game adaptations have becomein the past few years, Willems' scale is a useful measurement.The Last of Uswas a gargantuan hit for HBO, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the second highest-grossing movie of 2023, each Sonic the Hedgehog movie is bigger than the last, andFallout has already been renewed for a second season. Though theSonic the Hedgehogmovies are closer to ‘90s-style adaptations — with familiar characters placed in a new setting alongside human characters that don’t appear in the games — the rest are extremely faithful to the source material. But, within that faithfulness, there is room for smaller choices that radically shift how the property’s most rabid fans perceive the series. One of those issues is how they handle canon.
Merriam-Websterdefines canon as “a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works.” When we talk about the canon of a fictional world, we mean the works that actually count, the ones that contain the events that actually happened.
Falloutfans have paid a lot of attention to how the series approaches the established timeline of the games. There wasdebate for daysafter the premiere about whether the show had made fan-favorite gameNew Vegasnon-canon. The message from Bethesda is thateverything is canon. New Vegas is canon, and the show is canon within the world of the games. Though the Fallout TV series is a work of adaptation, its creators are also positioning it as a seamless addition to the existing video game world.
It’s an interesting tactic, and reminds me of The Wachowskis’ transmedia approach toThe Matrix. The movies were canon, the games were canon, and everything was part of one big, ongoing story. This is distinct from the approach most adaptations take. TheMCUmines the comics for material, but the comics exist in a separate continuity from the movies. In fact, the comics often exist in separate continuities fromeach other. I bought a bunch ofSpider-Mancomics as a kid and they were often in completely different sub-series with different names. Ultimate Spider-Man was distinct from The Spectacular Spider-Man, which was distinct from The Amazing Spider-Man, which was distinct from…
Given that the Fallout games are choice-based RPGs,decisions have to be made about which player choices will becanonical and which are not. That has been one of the more interesting aspects of the adaptation for Fallout diehards.
The Last of Us is more in line with the MCU’s approach to adaptation. It threw the possibility of the Fallout tactic out in the very first episode, when it moved the date of the outbreak from 2013 to 2023 - a logical decision. The game was only set in 2013 because that was the year it was set to release. If showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann had stuck with 2013 when bringing the game to television, it would have lost its immediacy. “What if this happened now?” would become “What if this happened ten years ago?” But in doing this, it meant that this Joel and Ellie were a different Joel and Ellie than we met in the games.
The Fallout Of Adaptation
That was inevitable with The Last of Us in a way that it never was with Fallout. The Fallout games don’t have one main character with an arc extending from game to game. They have player-created characters that slot into an existing story, but can pull and push it as they go. It’s easy to tell a new story that sits within the existing canon, just because that’s basically whateverybodyis doing in their own playthrough.
But Joel and Ellie are distinct characters with established personalities, backstories, and arcs. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s Joel and Ellie couldn’t be the same as Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson’s unless the showrunners made an adaptation that strictly brought over every moment from the game. That would be boring, but that’s what they would have to do for the two series to occupy the same canon. It would all be one canon, but it wouldn’t be much of an adaptation.
As more and more games get adapted in Hollywood’s gold rush for bankable IPs, more showrunners and filmmakers will be confronted with this same choice. As in the Fallout games, many different choices are viable, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have consequences. They will have to fallsomewhereon the spectrum.
